Boxes
by Mizamour
Summary: [Pedro Paramo] Juan Ruolfo’s Pedro Paramo from Dona Eduviges’ point of view. The spiders don't come anymore...


Boxes

Juan Ruolfo's Pedro Paramo from Dona Eduviges' point of view

_Disclaimer: I don't own Pedro Paramo_.

Boxes. Mostly full, what's in them probably forgotten, but I'll never know. I just keep them, multiplying in the shadows, odds and ends and threads of webs unfinished, waiting, undisturbed. The spiders don't come anymore, no real ones at least. There's always the smoke wisps – they can be anything. Usually people. But you never can tell… except when they're really alive. My son came today. My son – he should have been my son, and he is now. He passed from Doloritas to me, just like it was supposed to happen. Poor Doloritas…she must think I've left her alone. We were the best of friends, really, we were. Truly the best of friends. He's sleeping now. Will he sleep for long? I think the spirits have already begun to whisper to him. He sleeps in the back, the one room without boxes. Free, empty, it looked to the traveler – his shoulders fell a bit as he walked into the room, letting out a sigh and unconsciously stretching his arms as if finally free. He will find out soon that the room is full without boxes. There are no boxes that can contain what lives in that room. It is free and a prison, but he does not know that yet. My son…it is both funny and strange. He seems drawn to fate like a moth. He will be burned. But will it be better?

I watch him sleeping. His lashes dart up and down lightly, pale ghosts sitting on his lids. His mouth is a frame of colour, fresh from life among the living. It will fade soon. His body is twisted, chest one way, legs the other – for so sleep and death mingle here, stirring the dead soul into existence while pressing the live one out of the body. Into another box. The stars are out tonight. The dead walk. They do not come here – this house is already claimed by those greater spirits. The dead, even lost, know their place. I asked him to eat, my son. He said no. He must eat soon to stay among the living. But for now he will sleep. I will let him sleep.

I spoke to him today. I asked him if Dolores told him anything about me, and he said no. She told him only good things. I was not angry. She never did see the good things here – what good she saw was in her own world, in the clouds of familiar dreams. No, I was not angry. I thought she saw more…more to me…but I was not angry. Never. Pedro was the only one who could stir that. No, no more. The stories must be told in time, as they passed.

I am old today. I could not tell my past otherwise, or it would rise up and devour me with its stifled passion, its held-back ferocity. So I am old, no longer the youth that felt such power on the night when Innocencio Osorio gave Doloritas the prophecy. She could not lie with a man that night, he whispered, his eyes blank orbs under veined lids, rubbing his hands hard and fast over her back. The moon was wrong. Was it only I that knew why he really gave her that prophecy, or did others? Did she? She seemed so innocent as she stared at the words hanging in the air, the words that Innocentio had twisted and conjured out of other things to fit his desire. She told me she could not lie with a man, she could not, it would be terrible, she would die. She feared she would die, the poor pure one. She asked me – asked me as a friend, to sleep with Pedro. And I did it, I did it because she begged me. I went in the dark and in my lust, the beautiful frightening gloriousness that was dying to live outside of my cramped dusty heart. I crawled in bed with him like a worm into the dry soil. Better the dryness than drowning in the outside rain. But he did nothing to me, only slept. Slept without a hint of death - nothing but life ran under his skin, just below the surface so I could see it like a thin sheet of sparks. All he did was wedge his legs between mine. You were one spark away from me, my son – but caged by skin. He gave you to Doloritas and not me on purpose – he wanted it that way. She would be full, a sea of you and anguish and resentment and broken dreams, a carrier of part of his life, and I would be dry, with cacti of loss and nothing and constant veiled sun keeping me from the fire I needed inside. He chose that for us. Neither of us would have peace.

"Will you rest?" my tongue asked my son. He did not answer.

Miguel was his son. Not mine…his other sons were mine. But not Miguel. Miguel was never mine, not truly. He spent every night with me, and was mine until he left – then he was gone, a stinger on the wind, until he came back, and he was mine again. But he was never all mine, and he was never Pedro. He was a slice of his father, cut from the burning heat of his body, with fatal drops of Pedro's fire under his skin. The girl who drank his blood never could drink that, never could reach the last drops of him, the ones that were pure fierce life. She could taste hints, mingled like smoke in him, but she never could have all. Neither could I. The night he died I asked if she had left him – I knew she could not, but I still asked with the sharpness of hope. And he said he was lost. That was the only time he ever said that. He never admitted to not knowing his way. The people of Comala called him crazy because of that, the way he would ride in calm racing circles around the buildings and grass, searching with the fever of a treasure-seeker, and he never would admit he was lost. That day you jumped the fence and died, you still had not found your way. Your horse went mad with all the demons you drove him to, but he still felt such loss when you died that he died as well. He was guilty for you, for you would take no guilt yourself. But you did tell me you were lost. For that I am thankful, Miguel. For that you are not my son.

He says he has not heard the dead. But he has – I hear them speaking to him. They just do not scream. He will hear them, soon. He will hear them when they scream.

I screamed. When I chose my death, when I cut my own throat, I screamed and dove into my death. Maria, sweet Maria Dyada, my sister – she begged to save me. She told him everything good I had done, she thought. Poor Maria, she came to that weak man to move heaven and hell – she begged one puppet to save another from the fire. But I was not a puppet – I controlled what I could, what I had. That's what she didn't know – that I was responsible. I had the control. Is that damnation, to choose your fate? It was not mine.

There I left him, there I left my son. Another was coming to care for him, to speak him into the whispers of death. He was going to hear the scream now. That is what I would leave for Juan, for my son. He would hear the call alone.

And he would choose his own road into the fire.


End file.
